Joshua Hardin

Growing up on a San Luis Valley farm near Alamosa, Jason and Joshua Cody remember figuring out as little kids how to operate adult-size tractors and trucks with their short arms and legs. Jason was 9 and Josh 7 when they drove an old Dodge truck – Jason at the wheel and Joshua on the floor pushing the pedals – to transport hay bales for their parents’ dairy operation.

Now in their early 40s, and over six feet high, each of them married with children, the Cody boys remain fearless, willing to try anything, do anything to make the family farm go, to live another day on the land first settled by their great grandfather. Jason and Josh teamed up with their neighboring friends and farmers Keith and Suzanne Tolsma and took a big risk in 2017 in brewing “estate” beer – beer that is brewed with ingredients sourced entirely on the farm: malted barley, wild yeast, wheat, rye, hops and water.

Their farm-grown business, The Colorado Farm Brewery, is drawing travelers off U.S. 285 and west five miles on 2020 County Road 12 South. The diversion rewards the adventurous when the taproom comes into view, farm fresh beer flowing from its tap – the only farm-to-tap brewery in the state.

The fourth-generation Cody farm boys grow barley, rye, hops and wheat on the Alamosa County farm and draw water from the well their great-grandfather dug in 1936 – all the ingredients they need to brew their beer, right there on the farm. Jason and Josh are grateful because they almost didn’t get the chance to inherit the farm.

First, low milk prices forced the family to shut down its dairy operation in 1995, which had helped them survive for 30 years. Then trouble came to barley, their cash crop.

The family’s barley crops went into someone else’s beer for 50 years. Coors Brewing Company began paying pennies on the dollar for that barley.

SOME IN THE Cody family talked about quitting the land, giving up agriculture, the only thing they’d ever known. Phyllis Cody, Jason and Joshua’s late grandmother, disagreed. She wouldn’t sign the papers to sell the farm. The family chose instead to add value to their agriculture, anticipating consumer trends and leading the way for other farms to someday follow.

Jason, Joshua and their dad, Wayne, talked over coffee in the winter of 2007 and decided on a farm-rescuing idea: sell malted grains to Colorado’s growing number of craft breweries and distilleries. The Codys formed Colorado Malting Company in January 2008. Malting remains the Codys’ main source of income.

Farm families rarely throw anything away, for good reason. What seems useless in the moment might be useful in the future. Sure enough, the Codys pulled old equipment from their dairy days and repurposed it for malting.

The Codys converted the old dairy’s milk tank into a tank for malting grain. All the Codys’ malting equipment is driven by repurposed irrigation drives and gearboxes.

Next, Jason and Joshua had to build a customer base for their malt. Jason recalls driving a pickup loaded with bags of malt to breweries throughout Colorado, offering the bags for free for brewers to experiment making beer with the new malt. The brothers put in a lot of miles, but it worked. By 2015, the malt company had 174 breweries on a waiting list for its San Luis Valley malt.

Cody malt impressed the market, and so did Cody service.

A customer in Lyons, Spirit Hound Distillers, called at 5 p.m. one day to say it had received a shipment from the Codys and it was one bag short of peated malt. The shipping company had spilled a pallet. One bag tore, and they threw it away. The distiller asked for another bag, so Jason drove to Lyons, 288 miles one way, left the bag on the distiller’s doorstep at 2 a.m., turned around and drove home in the dark.

The Cody boys’ reputation helped them take the next step in opening the brewery, but nothing about the brewery and taproom has been easy. There’s nothing else like The Colorado Farm Brewery in Colorado, so state regulators didn’t understand it and still don’t.

To get its brewery going, the Cody family needed 50 gallons a minute from the family well. The state’s local water office eventually ruled that they had to dry up 35 acres to do it, and account for every drop of water, but that arrangement is provisional. The case is in water court.

The brewery also needed hops grown and yeast cultivated on the property. They built trellises for the hops and selected varieties that San Luis Valley’s soil, sunshine and low humidity would nourish. Yeast was perhaps the most challenging to cultivate on site. Jason learned of a valley in Belgium that cultivated yeast from the air. The Belgium valley is like the San Luis Valley. From that idea, Jason developed the wild yeast that the brewery uses today.

Joshua’s trips overseas shaped the new family business in other ways. He learned that beer brewing in Germany is precise and efficient and mechanical; brewing in Scandinavia is ancient and rustic and earthy. The Colorado Farm Brewery blends both.

On a trip to Finland, Joshua learned that juniper berries could substitute for hops and that alder wood smoked beer in Norway made with used yeasty bread might be a taste that Americans would enjoy.



The Cody family works and dreams together, with help from neighbors,
Keith and Suzanne Tolsma (middle and second from right), who’ve invested their hard work,
time and unique expertise. - Vibrant Valley Photography

A beer company in Norway listed its entire recipe on the label, the kind of transparency that the Cody family wants The Colorado Farm Brewery to practice. Cans and bottles of The Colorado Farm Brewery beer list the brewery’s recipe in language only a brewer could love: every Cody farm ingredient (Pils and Abbot malt, Cascade and Nugget hops and Spontaine yeast – the Codys’ proprietary strain), every step of the brewing process (from mash to “trubwürzpumpen” – a German term for allowing particulates to rise – to sparge) and every phase of fermentation (hundreds of hours of primary, secondary and lagering).

Joshua and Jason aren’t the boys operating the Dodge truck anymore, but Joshua is still pushing the pedal. He’s the scientist and chemist of the family, technical in his talk, propelling the company into the future. The steering wheel is still in Jason’s hands. He’s the one earning the trust of customers by driving all over Colorado, building relationships. Jason will tell you that he doesn’t act alone; the business is a group effort. Jason, Joshua, their dad Wayne, the Tolsma neighbors – Keith and Suzanne – and silent partners own the brewery. Jason, Joshua, father Wayne and uncle Tim Cody own the malting company. Wayne and his wife Sandy own the farm.

Sometimes neither Joshua nor Jason know where the other one is any given hour, but when they’re together, they know who to thank for all they have.

Jason and Joshua paid tribute to Grandmother Phyllis by putting a grainy 1939 photo of her, at age 16, on the first cans and bottles of The Colorado Farm Brewery beer, Batch #1 2017 Reserve. “She had recently passed, and I was going through old photos of her, and it inspired me to connect people to the farm,” Joshua said. “What is a family farm? It’s the history of the people who built it. I was inspired to give her the honor she’s due. It was her decision to keep us here.”

Also on the label is the Colorado state motto, a Latin phrase: Nil Sine Numine, “Nothing without Providence.” The family puts its ultimate faith not in its hard work, its smarts or the weather, but in their God. Phyllis had led Bible studies and welcomed anyone who showed up at her back door.

The smells of the farm have changed since Jason and Joshua were kids. When they helped with the dairy, the smells were familiar. Only when a class of Alamosa third graders visited and complained about the smell did the boys recognize that they had lost any sense of how a cow-based operation smelled.

Now that malt has replaced cows on the farm, the boys want to smell the scent that fresh, clean malt gives: the smell of cucumber. “That’s the smell of money today,” Jason said.

The Cody family is already looking 10 years into the future. Joshua points out that New Mexico allows breweries to offer distilled spirits as well, but Colorado doesn’t. Joshua hopes that a Colorado legislator will one day step up and author a bill that will help farms like the Cody farm add value to its agriculture – a bill that would eliminate antiquated, innovation-punishing regulations. If that day comes, Joshua will add single-malt whiskey, using the farm’s malted rye, barley and wheat, to the taproom.

Maybe that will take so long, they won’t be around anymore, Joshua said with just a little frustration.

Just ask Joshua for a tour of the taproom and you’ll see symbols of Cody tenacity. Joshua points out the collar that a mule once wore to plow the land before the family had tractors, and the bar furniture that’s built from a long-standing farm tree. A strong wind blew down the tree, but the winds of change haven’t swept the Codys off their land – not yet. Stubborn as mules, they intend to stay.



Joshua Cody grew up with his brother Jason on their great-grandfather’s
barley farm in the San Luis Valley, and took the family in a new direction: a brewery.
- Colorado Farm Brewery